Right now the left brain really isn't doing the
trick. We've known about climate change for 20 years--known that it's the
greatest threat humans have ever had to deal with. And so far we've
done"nothing. Oh, some little stuff here and there, but nothing on a
scale big enough to matter. Environmentalists have believed that the
scientific facts-- unimpeachable, and unbearable--would be enough to force
action. They've believed fervently in statistic, in bar graphs, in pie
charts, in white papers, in executive summaries, in closed-door
briefings. It's all noble, but it's meant that we never managed to build
a movement around global warming. You don't build movements with bar
graphs.

You build them, in part, with art. With painting and with music
and with graffiti and with dance and with concerts and with everything
that engages the right brain. Or that engages the heart, trusting that
where the heart leads the head will follow. (It seems to work better
that way for most people than the reverse). I'm thinking of this right
now because our friends at Planet-mag.com have started a new enterprise:
one of a kind paintings and sculptures from fine artists around the
world that "exhibit their personal artistic interpretation of earth." Go look--they're amazing.

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The website takes some of the money they make and donate it to
campaigns like ours at 350.org. But the money's less important than the
vision.

And it's a vision you don't need to be a certified
"artist' to share. Last fall we held a Global Day of Climate Action on
October 24. It turned out to be bigger than we could possibly have imagined--5200 demonstrations in 181 countries, which CNN said was "the
most widespread day of political action in the planet's history.' But
better than the numbers were the pictures: everyone uploaded images of
their rallies, and they turned out to be creative, passionate pieces of
public art. Seriously, take a look at
these too (and note that most of the people involved don't fit your
preconception of "environmentalist.' Most of them are poor, black,
brown, Asian, young--because that's what most of the world is.)

No one could suppress the startling beauty of their various
collective visions--for 36 hours it was the top story at GoogleNews,
proof that more newspapers and tv stations were sharing that story than
any other on the planet. At the Copenhagen conference six weeks later,
117 nations signed on to that 350 target. But they were the wrong
117--the poor ones, not the rich and addicted. So
on we fight.

And we do it with art in the vanguard. Because we're
not going to make the same mistake we made 20 years ago. We need a big
movement, and big movements come from beauty and meaning, not columns of
statistics.

Bill McKibben is the author of a dozen books, including The End of Nature and Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. A former staff writer for The New Yorker, he writes regularly for Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, and The (more...)